Emoji on iPhone 3G
With the newly released iPhone firmware 2.2, the long await and ‘shouldn’t have been missing for the Japanese launch’, 絵文字 Emoji characters, finally makes an appearance on the iPhone 3G.
Available emojis on the iPhone 3G
Eh? What is an emoji?
Emojis are, in short, just picture characters/emoticons (but a much wider range is provided) which Japanese people use in their emails instead of typing out the words. Emojis are standardised and built into Japanese mobile handsets for what seems like forever now and everyone I know here use them – especially girls (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). Whenever the iPhone is mentioned upon my Japanese female friends, I would a lot of times hear them say, “…but it doesn’t have emojis. Not suitable for girls”.
My bad example of an emoji email.
Needless to say, nearly all of the emails I receive use emojis but because the iPhone doesn’t support them, all I would get is a strange replacment symbol (like a big thick = symbol). So, I’m sure you know how overjoyed I was to know emojis were coming. In fact, I upgraded my firmware as soon as it came out but my joy was short lived and soon my blood began to boil into the hundreds of thousands degrees.
Why? Because of the following 2 reasons:
1. Emojis can only be used with SoftBank’s mobile email ‘~@i.softbank.jp’
This is probably no big deal for most users because an email account comes as standard with every mobile handset (~@docomo.ne.jp, ~@ezweb.ne.jp, ~@softbank.ne.jp) and one cannot add other email accounts to the phone (you can of course access webmails via the PC viewer browser).
The problem is with SoftBank’s ‘iPhone email system’. On all carriers and SoftBank phones (except iPhone), email messages are ‘pushed’ to the phone (been like this forever). For the iPhone, a message first pops up saying “mail received” and from there, you have to launch the email program, which at this point, is ‘fetching’ the mail. Sometimes, it takes forever to download an email. To make this worse, there is no alert sound therefore you do not even know you received mail, unless you’re always staring at your screen.
The “you got mail” message. No alert sound accompanies this.
Because of this annoyance, a lot of people (like me) actually use Apple’s ME.COM service so emails can be pushed to the phone. And because people use ME.COM, they can’t use emojis because it is not supported.
2. Emojis work only between SoftBank users
This is beyond PATHETIC! What is the darn point?! 90% of my friends here do not use SoftBank (SoftBank is crap and everyone knows this but people who want an iPhone have no choice because it is exclusive to SoftBank). I emailed emojis to a couple of close friends whom are all using DoCoMo but not a single one of them were able to see the emojis. A harder kick to the nuts: when they replied with emojis, I couldn’t see theirs either.
CONCLUSION
Because of the above, it was absolutely pointless in adding emojis to the iPhone (Apple should have spent their time adding ‘copy and paste’ instead!). I don’t know who to blame for this crap, Apple or SoftBank?
We don’t have it here on the iPhone in Canada yet, but then again, other cellphone companies and carriers don’t really offer the option to.
It’d be nice to be able to send it, but I’m pretty much just stuck using
and 
and :S all the time. We’re still in the stone ages compared to you guys.
Sigh.
BTW, blame both companies for not working together to provide the optimum solution for their customers.
Relax!
You probably don’t remember but only 5 years ago the emoji between Docomo, AU, JPhone were not compatible either. The press release said that they will make emoji work across the other carriers shortly.
The emoji concept seems really neat, I wish we had that here in the states insead of just smilies.
Got the emoji icons working here in Canada. As long as your friends have an iPhone that’s been upgraded to 2.2, they will be able to receive them. Just gotta jailbreak it first. Go into Cydia and look up emoji and there’s a patch you can install to remove the Japanese iPhone restrictions
That sounds just as pointless, Cal
Lots of people I’ve spoken to here in Japan, would really like to get an iPhone, but their only reservation is this emoji situation. Now they are available, but only between SoftBank users, which isn’t really much good. The Japanese ALL use emoji even in serious situations (but not in a business context). They not only use them for their cuteness factor, but also as a kind of shorthand around their writing system. Japanese is a complex, confusing language, even to a lot of native speakers, or so it seems anyway.
To Craig: Japanese is not confusing to native Japanese speakers.
Thanks for this article. I use a SoftBank iPhone, and was looking forward to emoji after the update. But they did not seem to appear, except in SMS messages, and even then is was only sometimes. I just noticed today the option to turn on the emoji keyboard, but it never appears when I switch through the keyboards. I use a MobileMe address rather than one from SoftBank, so perhaps the keyboard doesn’t appear if the email account settings indicate something other than a SoftBank address.
Oh…I forgot something.
Not having emoji is not as big a problem as one might expect from the “bad example” you have above. In your example, you use the emoji as verbs and nouns. If those icons were removed, the message would be undecipherable. My experience reading English and Japanese-language messages composed by native Japanese speakers is that the icons are typically placed after phrases and before sentences, rather than used as replacements for them.
So, examples might be:
Happy birthday!
Do you wanna eat lunch?
I’m taking my first trip with Hiro!
These sentences are still understandable even without the emoji, though admittedly they would not be as cute.
Jus updated my iPhone jailbroke it and got the emoji since my girl is in japan she wudnt shut up about it anyways I was able to email her with it but when she replied all I got was a box with a question mark this don’t make sense if I’m able to send shudnt I also be able to receive? How do I fix this?
Emoji won’t work over international messaging. I tried (between an iPhone and a Toshiba 904T). Sorry.
I just got my 3g from softbank. How do you even bring up the emoji dialogue?
In softbank mail, toggle the globe key (bottom left-ish) until it shows up
Here is the way to use emoji everywhere on iPhone:
http://www.brighthub.com/mobile/iphone/articles/16641.aspx
Best is using just an emoji as sub for a whole sentence
eg “I’m going home” CSM justbbe a pic of a frog
Japanese eespeakera will know why